


Secret

by spinsters_grave



Series: Voltron Angst Week 2k17 [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Conspiracies, Gen, Secret-Keeping, This is my favorite work for this project so I'd really appreciate if you'd read this, Voltron Angst Week 2k17, You can pry French-Canadian Mama Holt from my cold dead hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 06:34:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10691709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinsters_grave/pseuds/spinsters_grave
Summary: Alt Title: All The Trouble of TreasonAlt Alt Title: Hell in a HandbasketThe Garrison knew everything. They knew about what happened to Victoire Holt's family, they must.





	Secret

His parents couldn’t have handled two children.

 

Iverson only found this out in the Garrison, his imitator college. Trade school. He compared stories with other cadets and found that his parents were too overbearing. They would have combusted trying to love two children the way they loved him.

 

He was okay with that. His parents were good people. Iverson, Sr was in intensive care at an old person's’ home of Iverson, Jr’s pickings. Iverson, Jr sometimes visited his mother’s grave and laid down lavender.

 

Back when they were both alive, they protested Iverson enlisting. They needn't have worried so much. Iverson only received some shrapnel in his left eye. Nothing life-threatening, just someone having too much fun with a car bomb. Not his car.

 

The Garrison took him back in to teach their young cadets discipline and honor. Military traits. In the beginning, Iverson tried to be nice about it, but eventually he learned to teach his cadets the way his drill sergeant taught him. He yelled, he acted exasperated, he was rude and unforgiving. And his cadets learned discipline and honor.

 

Iverson’s G.I. Bill only lasted a few years, and then he had to live on his teacher’s salary. It was cheap, and he lived on school property. Iverson ate instant ramen and considered getting another job, somewhere far enough away that his cadets wouldn’t see him checking groceries at an Albertsons or a Walmart.

 

Wait, Albertsons didn’t exist anymore. It had been bought out by another company. The one they had in town was too remote to have the sign fixed.

 

The Garrison wasn’t the best place for an ex-military like Iverson. There were a few things, like someone yelling and slamming a door, that scared him. Sent him into a panic, sometimes. There were other things that he just didn’t like, such as the rudeness of his cadets and their willingness to throw each other under the bus. There wasn’t any loyalty. Iverson was  _ built _ on loyalty. It chafed.

 

Iverson clicked through another file on his computer. There were a few things he wanted to check to make sure no one was digging around. Checking the access logs was tedious, but necessary.

 

There was an entry date at 0224, but Iverson figured that to be some cadet up studying. They wouldn’t have been able to access the password-protected files, anyways. Only a couple cadets were proficient in computer code, and none of them had any inkling of what was in Iverson’s personal files.

 

Someone was in Iverson’s personal files.

 

He almost spat out his coffee. That shouldn’t be possible, not from an outside computer. His password was a keysmash, for Pete’s sake. Iverson had to write it down on a post-it note on his computer. Which, on second thought, that wasn’t the best security system. Whatever.

 

Iverson himself wasn’t proficient in code, so he couldn’t kick out the intruder. He left that to security division. Which he wasn’t calling.

 

He stared down the phone. The off-white plastic stared back up at him, silently challenging him.

 

_ It’s right there,  _ Iverson’s logic told him.  _ Reach out and grab it. You know you have to. _

 

But Iverson still hesitated. Something deeper than logic was telling him he shouldn’t, he should let the intruder do what they needed to. Iverson wanted to call it intuition, but that would be a dishonor to intuition.

 

Intuition was what saved him when his buddy’s car blew up. Intuition was what told him to enlist. Intuition had told Iverson to stay away from the 24-hour store on the corner more than once. Intuition had saved him time and time again. This paltry little feeling, this deeper-than-logic thing, wasn’t intuition. Just a feeling.

 

Iverson closed his activity-tracking window and opened up a Word document to create next week’s lesson plans. He didn’t think about the intruder, or what they would do with the information. Almost absent-mindedly, like Iverson didn’t know what he was doing, a movie clip from one of his password-protected files moved to his desktop.

 

_ Are you sure you want to move this file?  _ Windows asked him.  _ It will no longer be password-protected. Y/N. _

 

Iverson clicked the ‘Y’ button quickly and pretended he hadn't seen the pop-up at all. Annoying little buggers, those pop-ups. Can’t get rid of them fast enough.

 

Iverson took another sip of his coffee. It was getting colder. Cadets needed to learn something about putting pedal to the medal, and how they shouldn’t. There were only a few pilots skilled enough to fly that fast, and they were all dead, or worse.

 

***

 

Victoire Holt wanted  _ Answers.  _ Now. Immediately. Yesterday. A week ago. A month ago.

 

She was on her third or fortieth cup of Red Bull. They sold it at the Albertsons in bucket loads, and Victoire had already had to go back and get new packs twice. Empty cans littered the area around her desk and her work computer. Victoire was sure some drink had spilled on one official document or another, but she was too absorbed in her cyber-code world to care much.

 

The Galaxy Garrison was surprisingly easy to hack. Victoire expected a military instillation to be more concerned about its security, but whatever. Bully for her.

 

Even if the Garrison had felt inclined to buff its cyber security, Victoire's entire  _ family _ had been taken. Her son, her daughter-inclined child, her husband. Matthew, Katherine-Pidge, Samuel. Her bible names. She would get her  _ Answers,  _ and she would get them now.

 

A sudden blip of activity sounded on Victoire's computer. Iverson had logged on. Victoire considered backing off until he left, but she figured he wouldn't know she was there.

 

She dug around his folders, flipping through files likes there was no tomorrow. And then she stumbled upon an encrypted folder, and she thought,  _ Huh. _

 

It proved difficult to hack. With Victoire's skills, she figured she would be able to break in in approximately three hours. Less if she didn't take a pee break. Ladies don't take pee breaks.

 

She kept an activity log in a small corner of her screen. It blipped at her periodically, telling her what files Iverson created and moved, or what folders he opened. It was mostly school things. Iverson was a teacher, after all.

 

It blipped at her incessantly now, and Victoire begrudgingly tore her eyes away from the lines of coding to glare at the window. "What," she hissed at it, then winced when her throat scraped against itself. She took another sip of Red Bull.

 

She read the information, but it took a second since it was a small line of text and Victoire wasn't wearing her glasses.

 

Her eyes widened the slightest bit, and she quickly minimized the coding and jumped into Iverson's files. He had moved a small video file- two minutes forty-three seconds- from his password-protected folder to his  _ desktop.  _ Was the man stupid?

 

Well,  _ bully. For. Her. _ Victoire opened the movie clip onto her video player.

 

She leaned back in her seat to take in the whole picture. It opened on a desert landscape, where an explosion had apparently just happened. It said so on the white script on the bottom left corner:  _ Eastern Mojave Desert. Sept. 13, 2046; 1435. Two minutes after explosion. _

 

Victoire raised one delicate eyebrow. She had developed that skill before her first year of college in front of the mirror, sure that she would use it often. She did, just not in the way she imagined.

 

There was some technical jabber off-camera. They were excited about something.

 

Someone gasped, and someone else said "It's coming back!" It was a little odd, listening to someone saying something with such emotion without looking at their face.

 

A flash of something blue and metallic flew in the top right corner of the frame, and the camera jolted to try to follow it. Victoire winced at the inelegance of it all, but then she figured she couldn't talk. She had Red Bull dripping on a client's paperwork.

 

The video was a little hard to see in the two seconds it took for it to focus, but Victoire could make out a big, blue blob. It was amost pretty. And then it was a giant mechanical lion, running across the desert landscape and flying in the air.

 

A what. This video had to be fake. Victoire considered it, though- why have a fake video hidden in a password-protected folder? Was it a meme? Probably not. Iverson was too stuck-up for memes.

 

So that meant it had to be real. Which meant that the government was hiding a mechanical blue lion somewhere in the Eastern Mojave Desert.

 

This must have something to do with Katherine-Pidge. Victoire didn't believe in coincidences. This video, this cryptic video, was one step closer to finding her family.

 

***

 

The Eastern Mojave Desert was hot. Victoire had dressed for the occasion: she wore a white t-shirt she had obtained from a charity event and jean capris. She slipped on her Nikes and her sun visor, lathered on sunscreen, filled a fanny pack with bottled water and granola bars, and she was all set to go.

 

She knew the crash site was about ten miles out from the Garrison. Her phone gave her a circular path around the Garrison, with a radius of (you guessed it) ten miles.

 

She could walk for hours. She did. And she didn’t find her  _ Answers,  _ just more of the same nothing and desert landscape that placed the video. She couldn’t find the right rock formation where the video was filmed. She couldn’t find anything for ages.

 

And then she found a shack. It was run-down, but it had basic supplies. Victoire counted two water buckets and about a thousand instant ramen packs. After some digging, she found a first-aid kit underneath a sink that didn’t work.

 

And after some more digging, she had the mind to pull away a sheet she thought was covering a window. It wasn’t covering a window. It was covering a conspiracy board.

 

Victoire wasn’t a stranger to conspiracy boards. She had built one or fifteen of her own, both before and after her life went to hell in a handbasket.

 

She gave it one critical look. Something about a lion and rock formations. She peered closer at the board.

 

A fraunhofer line. Okay. Didn’t look familiar, but okay.

 

She kept looking at the carvings. The photographs of the carvings. They were saying something to her, something she needed to hear.

 

_ Your kids are in space, _ they said, but Victoire thought she must had heard wrong.

 

_ No, listen, your children are fighting a ten thousand year old empire bent on destroying Earth and the rest of the known universe, _ the carvings said.

 

_ Sure, Jan,  _ Victoire thought.

 

_ Seriously,  _ her  _ Answers  _ said.  _ You know it’s true. You can feel it, somewhere deeper than logic. You know it’s true. _

 

Victoire hesitated. This was crazy, speaking to carvings. Speaking to photographs of carvings.

 

_ No it’s not, _ the carvings said.

 

***

 

Liesel was having a decent day. She wasn’t partial to it, but it was okay.

 

She inspected her nails. They were dry, she had done them last night, but the pinkie on her left hand was starting to crack. She didn’t want to re-do it yet.

 

Someone slammed a huge stack of folders on her desk, and she jumped, narrowly catching her coffee. Her nail chipped a little, and she groaned.

 

The stack of folders was about as tall as Liesel was, sitting down. She had to rise a little out of her chair to see who was standing behind them.

 

A lady with short auburn hair (Liesel could only hope to dye hers like that) and a vaguely crazy look on her face was breathing heavy, her arms locked against the side of Liesel's desk. She was wearing a white t-shirt and capri jeans.

 

Liesel looked up through her eyelashes, trying to take control of the situation. She cleared her throat and flipped her skirt underneath her butt as she sat down. Finally, she asked in her customer service voice, “Can I help you?”

 

The lady tried to catch her breath, but she was pretty old. Leisel hesitated for a second, then went to get her a glass of water.

 

The lady drank it down quickly. Leisel got her another, and after a few glasses, the lady had regained her composition.

 

“Yes,” the lady finally said. She had a vaugely French accent, and Leisel was even more jealous of this woman. “I am Victoire Holt. And I want justice for my family.”

 

***

 

Iverson didn’t appreciate being interrupted like this. He went to all the trouble of treason, only for this Victoire Holt demand he raise the dead.

 

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, “but I have no idea where your daughter is. She’s missing.”

 

_ “Daughter-inclined child,” _ Mrs Holt hissed. “Of course I know they’re missing. Don’t belittle me.”

 

“Sorry, ma’am,” Iverson said. “I just don’t know what you want me to do about it.”

 

Holt leaned down closer to Iverson’s desk, and subsequently, his face. “I want you to  _ find _ them. I want my  _ Answers, _ and you can give them to me. Now where is my family?”

 

Iverson sighed.  He was going to get in so much trouble for sharing Garrison secrets with a civilian.

 

“They’re in space.”

 

***

 

_ He’s not wrong, _ the carvings said.  _ You know it. You can feel it. _

 

“Fine,” Victoire said, because the carvings were right. “They’re in space. We’ll go with that  _ totally unreasonable-” _

 

She took a deep breath. Anger wouldn’t help now.

 

“So we’ll go with this story,” she said. “How am I going to get them  _ back?” _

 

Iverson pinched the bridge of his nose. Victoire smirked to herself. She always prided herself on being difficult.

 

“You don’t,” Iverson said, somehow containing himself. “That’s the whole point. You just have to wait, and if they come back, then it’s all for the best. And if they don’t, then you’ll know they died heroes.”

 

“I don’t want them to die at  _ all,” _ Victoire said, surprised at the pricks at the corners of her eyes. “I want my children to outlive me. I couldn’t stand it if they died somewhere I can’t protect them, you-”

 

Victoire paused. Baring her heart and soul to a virtual stranger wouldn’t help, either.

 

“Do you have any children of your own?” she asked, instead of everything she wanted to say. She drew her spine up straight. “Don’t you know the great pains I would take to save my children in any and all circumstances?”

 

Iverson looked up at her with his one porcine eye. Victoire could think of ruder things to describe Iverson, but she abstained.

 

“I’m a teacher,” Iverson said, “and I do understand where you’re coming from. But there’s nothing either of us can do to bring back your son, your husband, or your  _ daughter-inclined child.  _ I can’t bring you your  _ Answers.  _ I can’t do anything.”

 

Victoire kept her spine upright, a skyscraper amongst ruins. “You mean you  _ won’t _ do anything.”

 

Iverson leaned one elbow on his desk and rubbed his forehead. “Ma’am,” he began, and Victoire already knew she wouldn’t like what he had to say- “Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re expecting me to do, but I can tell you that all you can do is wait. And all you  _ will  _ do is wait.”

 

Victoire brought herself up straighter, cold running through her veins. “I brought you some evidence,” she said, indicating the stack of folders sitting on the corner of Iverson’s desk. “You  _ will  _ look through it, and then you  _ will _ decide what to do.”

 

She kept Iverson’s gaze for a second, power held to power. She turned sharply on her heel and strode out the door, refusing to look back. She imagined Iverson’s face, shell-shocked, petrified, and she smiled a low and secret smile.

 

***

 

Leisel jumped, again, for the second or third time that day. For the second or third time that day, a stack of folders landed on her desk. One or two slips of paper floated out and landed feather-light on the floor at Liesel's feet.

 

“You’re the secretary,” Commander Iverson said. “I want you to get shredding on this.”

 

Liesel was overworked. Her nails chipped more and more each week. They used to last a month, but more and more often she had to reapply polish every Sunday.

 

“Yes, sir,” she said, because she had washed out of the Garrison and this was the best job she could get. “I’ll get right on it, sir.”

 

Iverson saluted her, for some odd reason, and retreated back to his office. Leisel imagined a great general retreating to his tent after a hard fought battle with Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Fighting a war he was meant to lose.

 

Leisel peeked at the top slip of paper in the first folder. It was small, barely the size of a Post-It note. Much of the folder was the same, which would be a bitch to shred.

 

She tried to read the note, but the handwriting was messy and her eyes were tired from staring at a computer screen all day. She huffed out a breath and wondered if a small smoke break would decrease her salary. She was practically living on instant ramen as it was.

 

She rose from her desk and grabbed the stack in her arms. She would drop them off in the room with the shredding machine and forget all about them.

 

***

 

“What folders?” Iverson asked, fighting back a victorious smile. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t think you were even here yesterday.”

 

END

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Katherine is a variation of a saint name, in case you thought I was out of my mind! Catherine of Alexander was a noted scholar who converted to Christianity. The pagan emperor of her time wanted to marry her, but she refused, and he sent her to die on a breaking wheel. Miraculously, the wheel broke under her touch. The kind of firework called a Catherine Wheel is named after this event. 
> 
> This saint has also been painted being married in front of the Virgin Mary to other women. I’m not an expert on pre-Renaissance paintings and symbolism, but having a bookish saint standing across from another woman saint in front of the Virgin Mary in a painting entitled “The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Catherine of Siena”? I think that’s a little gay.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are very much appreciated! 
> 
> Anyway, this saint has got my hype and I’m not even Christian.


End file.
